I did a quick test of Hansson’s implementation of the HPB, i.e. signaling server.
- Two identical VMs on a VMware cluster (using the free 40GB OVA file from Hansson).
It’s a 3-host Dell R740 cluster with full-flash vSAN storage with shared 4x1Gbps pipe. - Both had their CPU count doubled (2 to 4) and RAM quadrupled (2GB to 8GB) .
- Both completely exposed to internet - no firewalls/VPN, no ports closed.
- Standard script was used; GoDaddy’s DNS service and Let’s Encrypt SSL certs on each.
- One VM had only Talk installed; the other has Talk+HPB (signaling server) installed.
- The Talk+HPB VM used 2 different FQDNs, each with its own SSL cert, linked to the same IP.
- Both VMs were automatically updated to 20.0.03 after installation.
- Both worked after the final reboot without any tinkering…
I also have a Nextcloud VM (latest version; Ubuntu 18.04) without Talk but using BBB app.
Nine people (3x3 grid) were invited to join 4 different video conference setups
- Nextcloud with Talk only (first VM)
- Nextcloud with Talk+HPB (second VM)
- Nextcloud with BBB app
- Zoom (commercial license)
All users were within a city, using Windows PCs (not smartphones), 6 out of 9 on home WiFi.
In every case there was at least a 25/5 Mbps (down/up) connection to the internet (HTML5 test).
Each session lasted between 5 and 10 minutes…
No tools were used to measure performance and/or trace bottlenecks.
The idea was to get the overall (subjective) participants’ impression of different systems.
Overall impression:
- Zoom was the smoothest (may have to do with it being used the most by participants).
- Talk+HPB was close to Zoom; occasional freezes of some users (could be WiFi related)
- No serious problems with Nextcloud+BBB app; some minor freezes/blocking at times.
- Just Talk was unusable after the 5th user joined (long freezes; no audio/video).
Sticking with BBB for now. I’d switch from BBB to Talk+HPB if the latter had a recording option.
I liked the idea that HPB installed on one NC server can be used by a different NC server with just Talk installed (as an external HPB). The same as I use with coTURN, OnlyOffice, BBB… But I haven’t tested that…
EDIT:
The NC+BBB VM is not from Hansson’s OVA file.
It started its life at v.16 a few years ago, linked to LDAP/AD directory, using nginx/MariaDB (as opposed to Apache/Postgres), uses a coTURN server for STUN/TURN and runs on Ubuntu 18.04…
The external BBB server itself is still on Ubuntu 16.04… Hence, its’ not exactly apples2apples comparison…
Would be interesting to add Jitsi to the mix… It has a nice option where you can force the resolution on users webcams (i.e. down convert) to reduce traffic. In the end (I think) many problems arise from the crappy fluctuating home router WiFi bandwidth and the upstream bandwidth (i.e. sending your audio+video streams) often being one tenth of the downstream.
But my jitsi server went through too many customizations; need to start from scratch…